Driving Across the Continent in December (~100-6329')

After all that fuss over the mold in my car, I knew I couldn't make it through another five months of Redmond rain. It was time to head home to the East Coast, where I could cuss my way through horrible traffic underneath blue skies again.

So I packed my stuff and plotted my eastward route. This being December, I figured I'd stick to the interstates--no sense detouring to parks when everything's closed for the season--and take I-90 to I-25 to I-80 to I-29 to I-70 to I-64 to I-81 to I-66 to home. Quite the simple trip, compared to how I'd gotten there.

And then I called my parents to tell them my plans. "Are you going to need tire chains for that?" my dad asked. "And what about the weather?" my mom added. "Is it safe to drive? What if you get caught in a snowstorm?"

Snow? Tire chains? I hadn't even thought of those. Nothing had frozen down in Redmond... but the Cascades were a completely different story. I looked into it and learned that Snoqualmie Pass (I-90's route through the range) had already received dozens of feet of snow that fall. East of there, I'd need to cross three major passes through the Rockies: Lookout Pass on the Montana-Idaho border, Homestake Pass over the Continental Divide, and Bozeman Pass east of Bozeman, MT. And, as I'd learned on my westward trip, the Great Plains were prone to blizzards and ice storms as far south as Kansas. Snow and sub-freezing temperatures were a certainty; the only question was how much I'd get... and whether my little front-wheel-drive sedan could make it through.

Side Trip: Apple River Canyon State Park, IL

That night I camped in Apple River Canyon State Park, a quiet little place tucked, as the name suggests, into a canyon carved by a tributary of the Mississippi. Though I'd found the place by my usual unselective method of pulling up Google Maps and zooming out until I spotted a patch of green, it turned out to be another hidden gem of the state park systems, much like Tishomingo State Park in Mississippi. No flush toilets, but the campsites were cheap and spacious and self-registrable (for which I was grateful, having arrived, as always, after staffed hours). Tired from the day's drive, I pitched my tent, chowed down on my now traditional peanut-butter tortillas, and conked out.

-

So that was the first day of my journey away from home. It felt oddly normal, I must say, like any other "there and back" trip, only without the "back" this time. I felt no internal sense of how far I'd come, no twinge in my gut to tell me I’m going the wrong way. But the Midwest doesn't feel all that different from home, so far. There's still the same humidity, the same trees, and the same road signs (those, at least, will be a constant all through my trip across the US)--nothing to say that the Sleepy Hollow Rd. I passed in the Chicago suburbs wasn't just some unknown stretch of the one that runs by my house. At least not yet...

-

I woke in the night to a scuffling sound just outside my tent. My ears pricked, listening through the blind night and my tent's opaque rain cover. The sound continued; something was out there. A bear?--no, not here in Illinois--possums? Raccoons? Perhaps. I sighed in relief. No doubt the critters would soon move on, for there was nothing in my camp to interest them, not with all my food sealed up in...

...my car, whose windows I'd left cracked after dinner. That's what they were after.

Highpoint #27: Charles Mound, IL (1,235')

I began my Western leg in earnest with a long drive from Lake Erie to western Illinois. My first challenge, as I headed out at dawn, was getting to the interstate. Shouldn’t be hard, I’d thought, since this Cleveland suburb’s streets were on a grid... but they turned out to be a grid drawn by an attention-deficient toddler, full of three-way intersections, missing links, and random squiggly river-roads. After minutes of circling I finally found a ramp onto I-90/80W and immediately realized why there were so few of them: each one required a plaza to collect the highway’s toll.

Just keeps getting better, doesn't it?

$10.50 later, I was back in Indiana, this time on the Indiana Toll Road that runs across the state just south of the Michigan border. A sign at the border welcomed me to "The Crossroads of America"—a proud flyover state. Even its toll tickets were helpful, with a handy grid printed on the back that listed all the exits and the cost to travel from one to another. This is how toll roads ought to be done—if they must, only if they must. Certain other states (*cough cough* Illinois) ought to listen up.

From here, as expected, things got flat and rural. Not the grand open flatness of the Great Plains, though, but an odd claustrophobic flatness hemmed in by trees and buildings. The world seemed to shrink: there were no distant hills on the horizon to remind one of its vastness and no sudden panoramas around the bend, nothing but whatever lay between you and the nearest vertical structure... corn, most likely, for the good ol’ Midwestern Monoculture held sway here.

Low Point: Great Lakes Region (600-246')

...But first, a quick spin around the Great Lakes. There are five of them, as I'm sure you recall from grade-school geography:

Formed by glacial activity at the close of the last ice age, these lakes cover 94,250 square miles of land and contain 21% of the world's surface freshwater by volume. This water flows first into storm-driven Lake Superior,

Side Trip: Mississippi and Ohio Rivers (280')

After Taum Sauk, I headed east to Cape Girardeau, MO to visit my cousin. Situated on the shores of the Mississippi, the Cape is the central metropolis of an area of very small towns—or, to stretch a metaphor, a medium-sized fish in a pond of minnows. On my way into town, in the early afternoon, I hit traffic for the first time in several days. The town was large enough to offer a full complement of civic conveniences, so I grabbed some lunch, then holed up in the (surprisingly nice) local library until my cousin got off work.

Just as the Deep South differed from the Appalachians, so too did Missouri from the both of them. The accents were gone, for one, and the place-names took a sharp swing towards the bland. I was still solidly in the Bible Belt, though, with all that implies: pro-life signs along the road, Christian pop playing overhead in stores, churches all over the place, and so on. This is the Midwest, I suppose.

My cousin showed up around dinnertime. While we dined (at an Italian place in the old town), we caught each other up on our lives. She lives in Cape Girardeau, but works 45 minutes away as an engineer at a plant in [Bloomfield?]. Hardly an ideal living situation, but it’s the norm for a spread-out place like southeastern Missouri. She took the job—her first out of college—hoping to be promoted and reassigned somewhere more urban, but after spending a year in town she’s come to like the place… even with all the flooding.